Abstract

Blood is arguably the most important bodily fluid and its analysis provides crucial health status information. A first routine measure to narrow down diagnosis in clinical practice is the differential blood count, determining the frequency of all major blood cells. What is lacking to advance initial blood diagnostics is an unbiased and quick functional assessment of blood that can narrow down the diagnosis and generate specific hypotheses. To address this need, we introduce the continuous, cell-by-cell morpho-rheological (MORE) analysis of diluted whole blood, without labeling, enrichment or separation, at rates of 1,000 cells/sec. In a drop of blood we can identify all major blood cells and characterize their pathological changes in several disease conditions in vitro and in patient samples. This approach takes previous results of mechanical studies on specifically isolated blood cells to the level of application directly in blood and adds a functional dimension to conventional blood analysis.

Competing interests

Christoph Herold

Competing interests

Christoph Herold, Owns shares of, and is full-time employed at, Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH, a company selling devices based on real-time deformability cytometry. The author has no other financial interests to declare. Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH did not have any role in the conception and planning of this study, or its preparation for publication.

Oliver Otto

Competing interests

Oliver Otto, Owns shares of, and is part-time employed at, Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH, a company selling devices based on real-time deformability cytometry. The author has no other financial interests to declare. Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH did not have any role in the conception and planning of this study, or its preparation for publication.

Philipp Rosendahl

Competing interests

Philipp Rosendahl, Owns shares of, and is part-time employed at, Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH, a company selling devices based on real-time deformability cytometry. The author has no other financial interests to declare. Zellmechanik Dresden GmbH did not have any role in the conception and planning of this study, or its preparation for publication.

Tour der Hoffnung (noncommercial grant)

Sonnenstrahl e.V. Dresden (noncommercial grant)

Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (Seed grant FZ 111)

Technische Universität Dresden (Support the Best Program)

Reinhard Berner

Jochen Guck

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The work involved measurements of human blood samples. All studies complied with the Declaration of Helsinki and involved written informed consent from all participants or their legal guardians. Ethics for experiments with human blood were approved by the ethics committee of the Technische Universität Dresden (EK89032013, EK458102015), and for human blood and LPS inhalation in healthy volunteers by the East of England, Cambridge Central ethics committee (Study No. 06/Q0108/281 and ClinicalTrialReference NCT02551614).

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